Midwinter Sacrifice (10 page)

‘Do we turn off here?’

There are signs to Ljungsbro in both directions.

‘Don’t know,’ Malin says.

‘Okay, we’re turning,’ Zeke says, twisting the wheel. ‘We’ll have to check the GPS when we get closer.’

Malin and Zeke drive through Vreta Kloster. Past the dormant sluice-gates and empty locks. Bars closed for winter. Villas with people moving behind the windows, trees that have been left to grow in peace. An ICA supermarket. There’s no music in the car. Zeke didn’t insist and Malin appreciates the relative silence.

They pass a bus stop and the village spreads out to their left, the houses disappearing down a slope, and in the distance Lake Roxen opens out. The car heads down past a piece of woodland, then a field opens up on their right and a few hundred metres on more houses cling to the side of a steep incline.

‘Millionaires’ row,’ Zeke says. ‘Doctors’ houses.’

‘Jealous?’

‘Not really.’

Kungsbro on another sign, Stjärnorp, Ljungsbro.

They turn off by a red-painted stable and a stone-built cowshed, no horses in sight. Only a few teenage girls in thermal clothes and moonboots carrying bales of hay between two outhouses.

They approach the houses along millionaires’ row.

When they reach the top of another hill they catch a glimpse of the Cloetta chimney.

‘You know,’ Zeke says, ‘I swear I can smell chocolate in the air today. From the factory.’

‘I’d better put the GPS on, so we can find where we’re going. The first name on the list.’

She didn’t want to let them in.

Pamela Karlsson, thirty-six years old, blonde pageboy cut, single, sales assistant at H&M. She lived in a council block just behind the hideous white Hemköp supermarket. Only four flats in the grey-painted wooden building. She spoke to them with the safety chain on, freezing in white vest and pants, evidently woken by them knocking at the door.

‘Do you have to come in? It’s such a mess.’

‘It’s cold out here in the stairwell,’ Malin said, thinking, A man has been found murdered, hanging in a tree, and she’s worried about a bit of mess. Oh well. At least she phoned.

‘I had a party yesterday.’

‘Another one,’ Zeke said.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ Malin said. ‘It really doesn’t matter to us if it’s a bit messy. It won’t take long.’

‘Well, okay.’ The door closed, the chain rattled, then the door opened again.

‘Come in.’

A one-room flat, sofa-bed, a small table, a tiny kitchenette. Furniture from Ikea, lace curtains and a stripped, rustic wooden bench, probably inherited. Pizza boxes, beer cans, a box of white wine. On the windowsill an ashtray, full to overflowing.

She saw Malin looking at the ashtray.

‘I don’t usually let them smoke in here. But I couldn’t make them go outside yesterday.’

‘Them?’

‘My friends. We were doing some surfing last night as we drank, and that was when we saw him and the request for people to call in. I phoned straight away. Well, almost straight away.’

She sat down on the bed. She wasn’t fat, but her vest bulged as she sat.

Zeke sat on a chair. ‘What do you know about him?’

‘Not much, except that he lives round here. And his name. Apart from that, nothing. Is it him?’

‘Yes, we’re almost certain.’

‘God, it was all everyone was talking about last night.’

False memories, Malin thought. Recollections of other people are juicy conversation topics at parties.
Just wait till you hear what happened to a friend of a friend . . .

‘So you don’t know anything about who he was really?’

‘Not much. I think he was on the sick. And everyone called him Ball-Bengt. I thought it was because he was so fat, but the
Correspondent
said different.’

They left Pamela Karlsson with her mess and her headache and went on to an address on Ugglebovägen, an architect-designed villa on four levels, where every room seemed to have a view of the fields and, in the distance, Lake Roxen. A hollow-eyed insurance broker named Stig Unning opened the door after they knocked on the gilded lion’s head.

‘It was my son who made the call. You’ll have to talk to him, he’s down in the basement.’

The son, Fredrik, was playing a computer game. Thirteen maybe, thin, acne, dressed in jeans and an orange T-shirt that were too big for him. Dwarfs and elves were dying in droves on the screen.

‘You called us,’ Zeke said.

‘Yes,’ Fredrik Unning said without looking away from the game.

‘Why?’

‘Because I recognised the picture. I thought maybe there was some sort of reward. Is there?’

‘No, sorry,’ Malin said. ‘You don’t get paid for recognising a murder victim.’

A gnu was blown to pieces, a troll had its limbs torn off.

‘Should have called
Aftonbladet
instead.’

Bang. Dead, dead, dead.

Fredrik Unning looked up at them.

‘Did you know him?’ Malin asked.

‘No. Not at all. I mean, I knew his nickname, and I knew he stank of piss. No more than that.’

‘Nothing else we ought to know?’

Fredrik Unning hesitated and Malin saw a flash of fear cross his eyes before he once again fixed his gaze on the television screen and waved the joystick back and forth frenetically.

‘No,’ the boy said.

You know something, Malin thought.

‘Are you quite sure you haven’t got anything else to tell us?’

Fredrik Unning shook his head. ‘Nah, nothing. Not a damn thing.’

A red lizard dropped a huge rock on the head of a hulking great monster.

The third person on the list was a Pentecostal pastor, Sven Garplöv, forty-seven, who lived in a fairly average newly built villa on the other side of the Motala River, on the outskirts of Ljungsbro. White brick, white wood, white gables, white on white as if to keep sin away. On the way there they drove past the Cloetta factory, its corrugated roof like an angry sugar snake, its chimney pumping out promises of a sweet life.

‘That’s where they make chocolate wafers,’ Zeke said.

‘I wouldn’t say no to one right now,’ Malin said.

Even though they were in a hurry, the pastor’s wife, Ingrid, offered them coffee. The four of them sat on green leather sofas in the white-painted sitting room eating home-made biscuits, seven different sorts, as per tradition.

Butter in the biscuits. Just what she needed.

The pastor’s wife sat in silence as he talked.

‘I have a service today, but the congregation will have to wait. A sin of such a serious nature has to take precedence. He who waits to pray never waits for long. Wouldn’t you say, Ingrid?’

His wife nodded. Then she nodded towards the plate of biscuits.

They both helped themselves for the second time.

‘He was evidently a troubled soul. The sort of whom the Lord is fond, in His own way. We spoke about him briefly in the congregation once, and someone, I forget who, mentioned his name. We agreed that he was a very lonely man. He could have done with a friend like Jesus.’

‘Did you ever speak to him yourself?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I mean, did you ever invite him to your church?’

‘No, I don’t think that ever occurred to any of us. Our doors are open to everyone, although perhaps slightly more open to some people than others. I have to admit that.’

And now they are standing outside the front door of a Conn Dyrenäs, thirty-nine, who lives in a flat on Cloettavägen, right behind the football ground, Cloettavallen. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds for the door to open.

‘I heard you come,’ the man says.

The flat is full of toys, great drifts of them. Plastic in all manner of gaudy colours.

‘The kids,’ Conn Dyrenäs says. ‘They’re with their mother this weekend. We’re divorced. Otherwise they live with me. You miss them terribly when they’re not around. I tried to have a lie-in this morning, but still woke up at the same time as usual. I got up and surfed the net. Would you like coffee?’

‘We’ve just had some, so no, but thanks anyway,’ Malin says. ‘Are you quite sure it’s Bengt in the pictures?’

‘Yes, no doubt at all.’

‘Did you know him?’ Zeke asks.

‘No, but he was still part of my life.’

Conn Dyrenäs walks over to the balcony door, gesturing to them to follow.

‘You see that fence over there? He used to stand there waiting for the ball whenever Ljungsbro IF played at home. It didn’t matter if it was pouring with rain, or freezing, or boiling hot in the summer. He was always there. Sometimes he used to stand there in winter, looking out at the deserted pitch. I guess he missed it. It was like he’d sorted out a job for himself, something to do with his time here on earth. He ran after the ball when it went over the fence. Well, maybe not ran. Lolloped. And then he would throw it back. People in the stands used to laugh. Okay, it did look funny, but my laughter always stuck in my throat.’

Malin looks at the fence, white in the cold, the roofed stand with the clubhouse behind it.

‘I kept thinking about asking him in for coffee one day,’ Conn Dyrenäs says. ‘So much for that idea.’

‘He seems to have been a very lonely person. You should have asked him in,’ Malin says.

Conn Dyrenäs nods, goes to say something, but remains silent.

‘What else do you know about him?’ Malin asks.

‘I don’t
know
much. There was a lot of gossip, though.’

‘Gossip?’

‘Yes, about his dad being mad. That he used to live in a house and one day smashed an axe into his father’s head.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, apparently.’

And Daniel Högfeldt hadn’t managed to dig that out?

‘But that could easily have been a load of rubbish. It must be a good twenty years since it happened. Maybe more. He was probably completely harmless. He had kind eyes. I could see that from here. You can’t see that on the pictures in the
Correspondent
, can you?’

13

Malin is standing by the fence looking in at the football pitch, a grey-white field with some even greyer school buildings beyond. On the left is the clubhouse, a length of red wooden buildings with concrete steps leading to a green-painted door, and a hotdog kiosk bearing the Cloetta logo.

She sniffs the air. Maybe there is the slightest hint of cocoa?

Behind the kiosk is a tennis hall, a temple to the smarter sport.

She takes hold of the fence.

Through her black Thinsulate gloves she can’t tell how cold the metal is, and it seems to be just clumsy, lifeless wire. She shakes the fence, closes her eyes and can see green, can smell new-cut grass, expectation in the air as the first team run on to the pitch, cheered on by eight-, nine-, ten-year-old boys and pensioners with their flasks, and you, Ball-Bengt, alone behind the fence, outside.

How does anyone get to be so alone?

An axe in the head?

They’ll check your name in the records in the archive; it’s bound to turn up. The ladies in the archive are diligent, good at their job, so we’ll find you. We’ll be able to see you. Don’t doubt that.

Malin stretches her hands in the air. Catches the ball with her hands, before becoming heavy and motionless, before she stumbles backwards and to one side, thinking, They laughed at you, but not all of them, you and your hopeless attempts to catch the ball, your attempts to be part of these small occasions, the little things that make up life in a small community like this. Little did they understand that you were one of the ones who made this community what it is. You must have been a constant presence in many people’s lives, visible yet invisible, known yet unknown, a walking tragic joke that brightened up completely normal lives simply by being told over and over again.

They’ll miss you when spring comes. They’ll remember you. When the ball sails over the fence they’ll wish you were still there. Maybe then they’ll appreciate that that’s what having a nagging feeling at the bottom of your stomach feels like.

Is it possible to be any more alone than you? The butt of jokes when you were alive, unconsciously missed when you’re dead.

Then her mobile rings in her pocket.

She can hear Zeke’s voice behind her. ‘It’s probably Sjöman.’

And Sjöman it is. ‘No one else has called, even though he was some sort of local celebrity. Have you found anything?’

‘There are rumours of an axe to the head,’ Malin says.

‘A what?’

‘Rumour has it that he smashed an axe into his father’s head, sometime maybe twenty years ago.’

‘We’ll start looking,’ Sjöman says. Then he adds, ‘You can go to his flat if you want. Forensics have finished. They’re certain he wasn’t killed in the flat. Considering the level of violence used, there would have been at least some traces of blood left. But the Luminol test didn’t come up with anything. Edholm and a few others are knocking on doors. Härnavägen 21b, ground floor.’

Four sliced Skogaholm loaves on a speckled grey, laminated kitchen worktop. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling make the plastic packaging look wet and unwholesome, their contents a danger to health.

Malin opens the fridge door, to find what must be twenty packets of sausages, full-fat milk and several packs of unsalted butter.

Zeke looks over her shoulder. ‘A real gourmet.’

‘Do you think he lived off this?’

‘Yes,’ Zeke says. ‘It’s not impossible. That bread is basically nothing but sugar. And the sausage is fat, so they go together nicely. Typical bachelor diet.’

Malin shuts the fridge door. Behind the lowered blinds she can make out the shapes of a few children braving the cold and trying to create something with the frozen snow. It had to be pretty hopeless, the harsh substance resisting every attempt to mould it. They are all immigrant children. These white, two-storey council blocks, plastered concrete and flaking brown wood, had to be the absolute pits of Ljungsbro.

Muted laughter from outside. But still joyful, as if the cold can be mastered.

Maybe not the pits after all.

People live their lives. Happiness breaks out, shining points of magma in everyday existence.

A sofa with garish 1970s fabric against a wall of yellow and brown mottled wallpaper. A card table with a green felt top, a couple of rib-backed chairs, a bowed bed in one corner, its orange bedspread neatly tucked in on all sides.